Robison: Founding Fathers were great, not perfect, men

CLAY ROBISON, Copyright 2001 Houstn Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Sunday, August 19, 2001

AUSTIN -- Their accomplishments in creating the United States of America were certainly remarkable, but the reverence in which most of us hold our Founding Fathers has been enhanced by their deaths and the passage of time.

Had we been alive during the tumultuous early years of our nation, many of us would have disliked some of our icons-to-be and would have deplored both their political philosophies and their political practices.

Vision and courage abounded in that era, but so did arrogance, pettiness and venality. In short, today's statues were once all-too-human.

I have been reminded of those obvious but often-ignored facts while reading John Adams, the new biography of the second president by historian David McCullough. President Bush also has been reading this book while on his working vacation at his Crawford ranch, or so we have been told.

The text of the Simon & Schuster publication runs 651 pages, which could test the patience of a busy chief executive known to prefer short summaries of policy options over lengthy tomes. And it's certainly meatier than The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the book that Bush used to read to grade-schoolers.

But Bush obviously has more than a passing interest in the fact that Adams was the older half of the only other father-son presidential combination in U.S. history.

McCullough's book is an intriguing account of the personal and public life of the elder Adams, one of the strongest advocates of independence from Britain and a tireless patriot who, nevertheless, often gets overshadowed by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The material -- much of it drawn from Adams' family letters and diaries, including extensive correspondence between Adams and his wife, Abigail -- presents the human side of world-changing events and the good, the bad and the ugly of politics.

Take, for example, the 1800 election, in which Adams was unseated by Jefferson, a sometime-friend, sometime-foe, in what McCullough calls a "contest of personal vilification surpassing any presidential election in American history."

The candidates themselves avoided direct attacks on their opponents. They mostly stayed at home during the campaign season while surrogates and the highly partisan press of the era did the dirty work.

Jefferson, a leader of the Republicans, a states' rights party and precursor to today's Democratic Party, was, according to McCullough, decried in Federalist pamphlets and newspapers as a "hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer."

He also was reviled as an atheist and was the target of a "whispering campaign ... to the effect that all southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception."

Jefferson was already president before he was accused specifically in writing of a liaison with the slave Sally Hemings, a controversy that still rages today -- along with the gross inconsistency of the principal author of the Declaration of Independence remaining a slaveowner all his life.

Adams, meanwhile, was attacked as a "monarchist, more British than American" and was ridiculed as "old, addled and toothless," according to the biography. The incumbent president also was accused of being "quite mad."

Adams, a Federalist who favored a strong central government, had the misfortune of being attacked not only by Republicans but also by the more warlike wing of his own party, led by Alexander Hamilton, angered that Adams had sought (successfully) to negotiate peace with France at a time of heightened international tensions.

Jefferson ended up in an electoral-vote tie with Aaron Burr, which was broken after 36 ballots by the House of Representatives, and Adams finished third.

In the fledgling art of American politics, Jefferson -- if no more honorable -- was apparently more sophisticated than Adams. According to McCullough, Jefferson quietly encouraged and financially supported one of the most vitriolic Republican propagandists during the 1800 campaign. He also distributed other campaign literature while always being careful to conceal his own identity.

"That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naive and behind the times he was," McCullough wrote.